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The Future This Week: April 30, 2017

“If the government regulates against use of drones or stem cells or artificial intelligence, all that means is that the work and the research leave the borders of that country and go someplace else.”–Peter Diamandis

Automation and artificial intelligence continue to be hot topics–and getting hotter. I’ve heard more than one call to limit or ban them in the last week. That won’t work, for the very reason Peter Diamandis states in the quote above. There are over 200 countries in the world; there is no global governance that can impose the same restrictions on all of them. We have no choice but to proceed. Proceed with caution, of course. Proceed with our eyes open and with a close monitoring of the consequences. But proceed we must.

Google’s director of research, Peter Norvig, said that he does not buy the doomsday scenarios of rampant, runaway artificial intelligence destroying mankind. Speaking in an interview with CNBC, though, he did warn that massive workplace disruption is coming. “The pace may be so rapid as to create disruptions. We need to find ways to mitigate that,” he said.

On further investigation, I am fascinated with the concept of constructor theory. I’m a big fan of David Deutsch and just watched his video on it. If you read some of my earlier posts, I think physics, and more specifically, what we know about physical reality, is important in futures thinking. But quantum mechanics and chaos and complexity may tell us more about what we can’t do–which is precisely predict the future–than what we can do. Constructor theory seems to be more directed at what it is possible to do. I’m going to contact the group at Oxford doing this and see if somebody would be willing to be interviewed on the Seeking Delphi podcast.